Professional baseball has been considered America's favorite pastime for decades. Not only do baseball fans enjoy the performance of the professional baseball players but also imbibe in stadium refreshments and consume popcorn, peanuts and hotdogs. Sometimes, fans commemorate their attendance at a baseball game by buying souvenirs. One popular souvenir is a miniature baseball bat.
Miniature souvenir baseball bats have been sold in baseball parks for many years. One manufacturing company, Coopersburg Handle Works, had manufactured miniature souvenir baseball bats and sold them in ballparks during the 1940's and 1950's. Typically, these miniature souvenir baseball bats were sold in professional baseball parks with different variations of team logos or other decorative art, such as animations or cartoons. Usually, these miniature souvenir baseball bats were manufactured using either one color screen printing or foil stamping.
Presently, full-color logo designs are being applied to miniature souvenir baseball bats. Although these designs are greatly enhanced over the traditional one-color or foil-stamped miniature souvenir baseball bats, not many miniature souvenir baseball bats have been sold with a baseball player's image on the bat, until lately.
One company manufactures a miniature souvenir baseball bat with a baseball player's image formed thereon. The image is transferred onto the bat via a conventional non-contact image transfer (ncit) process. Generally, this process is an ink-jet process that sprays the image onto the bat using colored ink. The image generated by the ncit process reasonably portrays the image of the baseball player. However, the colors tend to lack luster i.e. dull in appearance and the quality of the image is significantly less than a photographic image, particularly in the image sharpness.
The invention overcomes these problems.